Bashkow

I’m currently writing a book, The Corporate Form, which gives a fresh answer to the vexed question of what is a corporation, providing a humanistic conception of the corporation that is more versatile and well-founded than the individualistic, finance-centric, market-like models current in economics and law. Although corporations are often thought of as vehicles for commerce requiring sanction of law, their history is much older than their adaptation to pursue profit. Indeed, the corporate form is more ancient than the institution of state-enacted law itself, appearing since remote times in elite households, religious bodies, and other variant forms in different parts of the world. Wherever they occur, corporations are underpinned by the culturally conventionalized forms of action, language, and thought by which people collectively co-create reified agencies that have real force in the world. This view of the corporation as a cultural form has profound implications for debates in business and law about corporate social responsibility and shareholder primacy.

I have done long-term ethnographic field research in two regions of the Pacific island nation, Papua New Guinea: Orokaiva in Oro Province and Arapesh in East Sepik Province. I wrote about some of this work in my book, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World, which explores how “whitemen” and the concept of development are understood by Orokaiva people in terms of their own cultural assumptions and evaluations of western power, wealth, and race privilege. In the book I examine the ambivalent meanings that “the whiteman” holds for Orokaiva, exploring the nature of racial stereotypes outside our own accustomed landscape of racial politics and assumptions. I show how stereotypes can be grounded in “raced” material objects other than living persons, explaining why they persist so stubbornly in the face of counterevidence.

I also have an interest in the history of anthropology, including understanding how past anthropologists were perceived by the people they studied and how this affected their findings. I’ve written about the anthropologist David Schneider’s fieldwork on Yap (Micronesia) during the U.S. naval colonial administration of that island after World War II. With Lise Dobrin I’ve written about Margaret Mead and her joint fieldwork with Reo Fortune in New Guinea in 1931-1932, on the basis of which the two came to contradictory conclusions about Arapesh culture, with Fortune disputing the view of the Arapesh that Mead published in her famous book, Sex and Temperament.

Lise and I also have a joint project about the life and work of the Papua New Guinean jurist, philosopher, and politician Bernard Narokobi, who we had the privilege of coming to know during our own Arapesh fieldwork

Finally, I have an abiding interest in the concept of culture as pioneered by Boasian anthropologists of the early 20th century. The concept remains fundamental for understanding the plasticity of human nature and the diversity of people’s lifestyles, tastes, abilities, and ways of living—their “cultures”. What species-level characteristics allowed for the emergence of human culture and its diversity? What processes of human growth and development ensure that human individuals grow up as cultural beings? Why do people tend to think that so much about their own culture is necessary and natural when in reality it could be different and it changes over the course of history? Why is culture such an important aspect of people’s identity? Such questions are as important today as ever.

My undergraduate teaching includes courses on “The Concept of Culture”, “The Anthropology of Globalization”, “Theories of the Corporation”, and “The World Is Our Laboratory: How to Do Ethnographic Field Research”.

At the graduate level, I teach classes on social theory, race studies, NGOs and international development, the history of anthropology, Melanesian ethnography, ethnographic research methods, and ethnographic writing.

2017 - Three Lessons I Learned From Charlottesville: The recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, likely won’t be the last attempt by white supremacists to stoke racial conflict. An anthropologist offers insights to other communities that might face similar challenges.

1991 - The Dynamics of Rapport in a Colonial Situation: David Schneider's Fieldwork on the Islands of Yap. In Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. George Stocking, ed. Pp. 170-242. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.